When I have launched this blog I did it with intention of spread Brazilian culture and culture produced by other countries around world. And then I wanna say thank you for the people from 120 countries who visit us. Thank you! Thanks to Washington Post, NYTimes, Amazon, USAToday, Paris Review, LRB, GoodReads, Time, Vogue, Esquire, Harpers, Simon and Schuster, Latimes, NPR, London Review and other sources by permission... You are the responsible by these dreams. Thank you for All!

sexta-feira, 30 de dezembro de 2016

In the summer of 1935, Mr.
John Grierson asked me to write a chorus for the conclusion of a G.P.O.
documentary film called Coal-Face. All I now remember about the film was
that it seemed to have been shot in total darkness and a factual statement in
the commentary—The miner works in a cramped position. My chorus, he told me,
would be set by a brilliant young composer he had hired to work for him, called
Benjamin Britten. The following autumn I went myself to work for the G.P.O.
Film Unit. What an odd organization it was. John Grierson had a genius for
discovering talent and persuading it to work for next to nothing. There was
Britten, there was William Coldstream, there was Cavalcanti, among others.
Personally I loathed my job, but enjoyed the company enormously. The film which
both Britten and myself worked on which I remember best was one about Africa
which never got made because it turned out that there were no visuals. Our
commentary was a most elaborate affair, beginning with quotations from
Aristotle about slavery and including a setting of a poem by Blake. I wonder if
Britten still has the score as there was some wonderful music in it.

What immediately struck me,
as someone whose medium was language, about Britten the composer was his
extraordinary musical sensibility in relation to the English language. One had
always been told that English was an impossible tongue to set or to sing. Since
I already knew the songs of the Elizabethan composers like Dowland—I don’t
think I knew Purcell then—I knew this to be false, but the influence of that
very great composer, Handel, on the setting of English had been unfortunate.
There was Sullivan’s setting of Gilbert’s light verse to be sure, but his music
seemed so boring. Here at last was a composer who could both set the language
without undue distortion of its rhythmical values, and at the same time write
music to which it was a real pleasure to listen. Another collaboration I
remember was a BBC program about the Roman Wall which we were both rather proud
of. It was from Britten, too, that I first heard the name of Alban Berg. We
went together to a memorial concert just after his death. I had a tummy upset
and threw up in the street.

I have, alas, no talent for
writing memoirs, for if I had, I would devote a whole chapter to a house in
Amityville, Long Island, the home of Dr. William and Elizabeth Mayer, where
Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears stayed in 1939–40, a house which played an
important role in the lives of all three of us. It was during this period that
Britten wrote his first opera, and I my first libretto, on the subject of an
American folk hero, Paul Bunyan. The result, I’m sorry to say, was a failure,
for which I was entirely to blame, since, at the time, I knew nothing whatever
about opera or what is required of a librettist. In consequence some very
lovely music of Britten’s went down the drain, and I must now belatedly make my
apologies to my old friend while wishing him a very happy birthday.

Drawn from The Complete
Works of W.H. Auden: Prose: Volume V, 1963-1968, edited by Edward
Mendelson, published this month by Princeton University Press.

A fly by imagination

And life passes so quickly...

Because literature is part of our history.

The main idea of this Blog is spread the habit of reading. Literature is part of our lives. When enter in the Literature world, we read better and we improve our though and imagination.I want, with this, divide a little of my dreams. Is to give opportunity to people read and know about works produced by ancient and contemporary writers, and mainly, myself to be insert in this wonderful world of the Letters.